Indian government sites keep serving revoked eMudhra certificates

What happened

On 17 October it emerged that eight eMudhra intermediate CAs chaining to the emSign ECC Root CA — G3 had trivially recoverable private keys. They were revoked the next day, and Mozilla and Chrome are now distrusting the G3 root.

Separately, on 19 October eMudhra revoked 9,356 certificates in its unaffected RSA hierarchy (emSign Root CA — G1) with the reason "Superseded". That batch matches every unexpired certificate that was missing the certificate-type policy OID required by eMudhra's own CP/CPS.

"Fear mongering" and the rebuttal

On 21 October India's Ministry of Electronics and IT (MeitY) posted a statement: an incident involving eMudhra's public-key infrastructure had indeed been reported, but some social-media accounts were "indulging in fear mongering," whereas the impact on Indian websites and applications had been "very limited and for a very short interval."

The author disputes both claims. The interval was not short: the flawed keys were generated in April 2025, so anyone could have recovered them for eighteen months before the report. Nor does the impact look limited: the compromised intermediates issued little, but because the whole G3 root is being distrusted, eMudhra estimates 30,000 certificates will have to be migrated. Most of those, though, appear to belong to US universities using eMudhra through InCommon rather than to Indian sites.

Revoked certificates still live

The main grievance is the 19 October revocation. Days later, Indian government sites are still serving revoked certificates, including four bodies under MeitY itself: STPI, Bhashini, UIDAI, and the Controller of Certifying Authorities, whose India PKI site is serving a revoked eMudhra certificate. Notably, that same authority regulates eMudhra's CA business in India.

The author checked the 8,947 hosts in the IGOD directory of Indian government websites. As of 23 October, 156 of them were still serving one of these revoked certificates. All were revoked on 19 October between 15:34 and 15:49 CEST.

Revocations happen — GoDaddy recently revoked 400,000 certificates — but they are usually paired with notifications to subscribers so they can move to new valid certificates. Whether eMudhra is doing anything of the sort now, apparently having lost interest in its TLS business, the author will not guess.

Source: Lobsters